Poster Abstract

P7.10 Nicholas Cross (Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh)

Theme: Data discovery across heterogeneous datasets

Creating a Nearly All Sky Near Infrared Catalogue from WFCAM-VISTA releases

The main surveys on UKIRT-WFCAM and VISTA are almost complete and much is now publicly available, and these cover almost all of the sky apart from at Dec>60, where UKIRT cannot observe due to its equatorial mounting. All of the data and the different releases are archived by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) in Edinburgh.
However, each survey is in a separate release database, there are different filters used (although almost all of the surveys use J and K/Ks) and overlap between the surveys that hinder a seamless all-sky catalogue. Moreover, the filters and calibration strategies for WFCAM and VISTA are slightly different which add to the complexity.
We discuss some of the work towards a final catalogue and the technologies that will both preserve the original releases but also allow users to access the whole NIR sky.